Nanomachines

My classes are talking about the relative expanatory merits of theism and naturalism when it comes to the rich information content of living things. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to rerun an older post on this topic: An article at Evolution News and Views (ENV) reflects on the news that three European chemists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for having engineered simple molecular machines. According to the article:

• Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France) in 1983 linked two molecular rings together.
• Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (Northwestern University, Illinois) in 1991 threaded a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and demonstrated that the ring was able to move along the axle.
• Bernard L. Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) in 1999 got a molecular rotor blade to spin continually in the same direction.

These are amazing achievements, to be sure, and required incredible skill and genius to accomplish, but compared to the thousands of complex molecular machines that operate in every one of the cells of our bodies to keep us alive the machines these men built are quite simple.

So here's a question: If the highest human genius is required to design and develop relatively simple molecular machines, how did the far more complex machines in living things develop by unguided random chance with no input from an intelligent agent? Is such a development independent of intelligent guidance even possible?

One of the Nobel recipients, Bernard Feringa, was asked by the Prize Committee in a phone interview what inspired him to work on molecular machines. Interviewer Adam Smith asked him:

AS: So you describe your work as being inspired by nature?

BF: Yes, of course. If you look at the cells in our body or the functioning of the organism, it is flabbergasting. It is fantastic to see how this intricate machinery works.

And when I'm talking about motors, as we focus on motors, if you look at the essential functions in the cell, like cell division, like transport, like making your muscles move, bacteria that go to food .... it's all controlled by molecular motors, and so the biological motors, and the biological machinery, is so crucial to all these functions.

And of course we get great inspiration from that, while we as chemists are extremely good in building all kinds of materials, and that is what intrigued me.

What sort of molecular motors is Feringa talking about here? Below are animations of four examples. You don't have to be a biologist to appreciate how marvelous these are and why Feringa seems to be grasping for superlatives to describe them.

Kinesin:

ATP Synthase:

Protein synthesizers:

Topoisomerase

These wondrous nanoscale machines leave one speechless. Language seems totally inadequate to the task of supplying adjectives to express one's amazement.

How did such complex machines ever come about, especially on this scale of size?

Maybe the Darwinians are right and they really are just the products of natural processes acting solely by chance, but, assuming one's mind is not already philosophically closed to the idea, it seems far more plausible to conclude that they were designed by an intelligent engineer of some sort.

Remember that on the Darwinian view most of these machines had to be already present in the very first living cells which means they didn't have eons of time to evolve nor could they have been the product of genetic mutation and natural selection since they had to exist before the cells that housed them could survive to reproduce.

Yet students are often taught in school that unthinking nature, unguided by any purpose or intention, somehow produced these astonishing structures. It's as if Nature waved a magic wand, sprinkled some pixie dust, and, presto!, there they were.

And the same folks who tell us this also insist that the belief that these machines must have been engineered by an intelligent agent is unscientific and "superstitious." Why?

Bacterial Factories

A couple of weeks ago we reran the five episode video series titled Secrets of the Cell featuring Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe.

Now episode six has been released. Unlike the earlier episodes which were about five minutes long, episode six is about 17 minutes and explores the fascinating abilities of bacteria, particularly bacteria which can orient themselves along a magnetic field.

What Behe presents is truly fascinating and raises some profound philosophical questions. For example, if Darwinian evolution is true how did such amazing complexity and abilities ever arise just through unguided, purposeless processes that had no goal in mind?

Even if genetic mutation and natural selection could be invoked to explain how a bacterium diversified into numerous different forms, a highly questionable concession, how did the first bacterium or the first living, reproducing cell arise before mutation and natural selection could kick in?

The first cell must itself have been extremely complex, and yet it's construction must've been like the spontaneous construction of a functional computer by a tornado swirling through a parts factory.

If factories such as are shown in the video are impossible without having been designed by an intelligent mind or minds, how could a factory such as is found in each bacterium ever be constructed apart from the engineering of an intelligent agent?

Watch the video and decide for yourself:

The President's Pander Ploy

President Biden senses a massive repudiation of his presidency coming in November and has cynically decided he can essentially "buy votes" for his party by canceling student loan debt. Such a move, he evidently hopes, would entice multitudes of grateful recipients into voting for Democratic candidates in the Fall.

Perhaps, but such a move on his part would be a gross injustice to the millions of people who worked long hours at a job, or even two, while going to school in order to pay their way or to pay off their loans.

If Mr. Biden chooses to have taxpayers pick up the tab for the loans of those who just completed their schooling, or simply refused to pay on their debt, then he's essentially making saps of those who did the right thing and met their responsibilities.

Jim Geraghty writes about this at National Review. He says,

If you borrow money and sign a contract promising to pay it back, then you must pay it back, or you will suffer serious long-term financial consequences. Or at least, that’s the way it used to work until Democrats decided they could win a lot of votes by just waving a magic wand and declaring that people didn’t have to pay their student debt back.

If you take out a loan to buy a house, you must pay it back over time, with interest. If you take out a loan to buy a car, you must pay it back over time, with interest. If you take out a loan to pay for a college education, you must pay it back over time, with interest.

You signed a contract. You knew the terms going in — or at least you were supposed to know them. You’re supposed to read the documents you sign. You knew the payments you were going to have to make and when you would have to make them. If you don’t want to deal with the financial pressure of debt, don’t take out the loan.

Taxpayers have already bent over backwards to accommodate those with student loan debt:

The federal government has postponed repayments of student loans seven times since the start of the pandemic; no one has been required to pay back a student loan since March 13, 2020. Interest rates on those loans during this period dropped to zero, and collections on defaulted loans stopped.

Mr. Biden proposes to forgive as much as $10,000 per borrower. One of the ironies of this plan is that it will largely benefit those who least need it:

...forgiving $10,000 per borrower would most benefit whites under the age of 40 who have graduate degrees and live in high-income, majority-white neighborhoods. This is one of the most Democratic-leaning and outspoken progressive demographics in the country.

This is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the Democratic Party’s Twitter class.

If you paid back your student loans in recent years, there is a good chance you were a chump. You paid money that Uncle Sugar was going to come along and cover if you had just waited. You should have spent that money on other things you would have enjoyed and defaulted on your payments, waiting for the federal government to come along and say, “Don’t worry, the taxpayers have this covered.”

If you currently owe a lot on your mortgage, your car payments, your home-improvement loans, or any other loan, and you’re diligently and responsibly making your monthly payments . . . well, you are kind of a sucker, too, because you borrowed money that you had to pay back, instead of taking part in Joe Biden’s free-money program.

The Democratic Party claims to be all about equity and fairness, but where is the fairness in this proposal? Not only does it make the most responsible borrowers "chumps" for being responsible it makes them doubly chumps because as taxpayers they will now be helping to subsidize those who'll benefit from Mr. Biden's cynical political pandering.

Perhaps the whole idea will backfire. Perhaps the millions who are being played for suckers will be so outraged at the injustice of what's being proposed that they'll vote against the Democrats in November. That, at least, would be condign karma.

How Much Brain Do We Need?

There's a fascinating article at Wired by Grace Browne who tells us of a woman in her fifties who for privacy reasons goes by her initials EG and who, amazingly enough, is missing the left temporal lobe of her brain. What's amazing about this is that the left temporal lobe is thought to be involved in language processing, and yet...

missing a large chunk of her brain has had surprisingly little effect on her life. She has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian—a second language–so well that she has dreamed in it.

She first learned her brain was atypical in the autumn of 1987, at George Washington University Hospital, when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. The cause was likely a stroke that happened when she was a baby; today, there is only cerebro-spinal fluid in that brain area.

For the first decade after she found out, EG didn't tell anyone other than her parents and her two closest friends. “It creeped me out,” she says. Since then, she has told more people, but it's still a very small circle that is aware of her unique brain anatomy.

Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.)

EG was eventually put in touch with Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT who studies language, and the two hit it off. Browne writes:

Just how remarkably little effect the uniqueness of EG’s brain has on her day-to-day life shows how sheerly expendable big chunks of our brains can be. Fedorenko points to a surgical practice called hemispherectomy used for children with epilepsy whose condition does not respond to medication.

The practice entails removing the half of the brain where the seizures are taking place, and these children have been shown to retain typical cognition. “If you can remove half of a brain and you work fine, that suggests there's a lot of bits in our typical brains that are redundant,” says Fedorenko.

“There's apparently a lot of stuff in our brain that is fully redundant, which is—engineering-wise—a pretty good way to build the system.”

The reality is that if the brain is damaged, it will often find a way to rewire itself.

Remarkably, EG’s sister is missing her right temporal lobe and is largely unaffected by it, suggesting there's likely some genetic component to the early childhood strokes that can explain the missing brain regions, Fedorenko says.

This raises a few questions. One is how much of the brain can one lose and at what stage of life can one lose it without it having any serious effect on one's ability to function? Evidently, much, or even most, of what is going on in our cognitive experience is not totally dependent on the brain.

The orthodoxy among materialists is that our cognitive functions are due solely to the material brain in our heads. In their ontology there's no room for an immaterial mind. Yet, if they're correct why would we evolve more brain matter than what we need to survive and function?

Another question is how did this ability to rewire itself and develop redundancy ever evolve by random mutations and natural selection? As Fedorenko says, “There's apparently a lot of stuff in our brain that is fully redundant, which is—engineering-wise—a pretty good way to build the system.”

Indeed, but blind, mindless processes like Darwinian evolution don't engineer systems. Intelligent engineers do.

It's remarkable that when talking about living things scientists find it very difficult to avoid using the language of intelligent design. Perhaps that's because the intuition that living things are intentionally designed for a purpose is so overwhelmingly powerful.

Rethinking Sex

Mary Eberstadt, writing at The Washington Free Beacon, reviews a new book by Christine Emba titled Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Emba is a columnist at the Washington Post and, according to Eberstadt, her book ...

performs the public service of wondering aloud whether everything done by "consenting adults" is by definition ducky. To the contrary, myopic focus on "consent," as the author observes, overlooks the sulfurous realities of today’s mating market.

Once, noncriminal but still noxious sexual misdeeds would have resulted in social ostracism, or frontier justice meted out by male relatives—or both.

Now, thanks to the slithering of pornography into young pockets everywhere, such acts have not only been normalized.

Judging by an eye-opening number of the book’s anonymous stories, they have in some cases become the sine qua non of male company itself.

Emba recounts numerous tales of rather awful sexual maltreatment of women at the hands of young men who, she says, are otherwise "great guys":

"She really didn’t like the choking, Kirsten explained, but she really liked him."

This sentence, which ought to have been the book’s subtitle, captures the awfulness afoot in one swoop. Several recent studies cited by the author prove the nauseating point: More and more women consent to sex only to endure unexpected violence after saying yes.

The example of choking is just for starters .... Suffice it to say that among some subset of today’s men, verbal and physical abuse have apparently become the new candy and flowers.

The book evidently flouts the current orthodoxy that holds that no sexual behavior is deviant:

Emba performs another civic mitzvah in saying aloud that there is something wrong with this picture, thus giving permission to other women (and men) who think the same. The crux, as she writes, is that "consent" can be misused to justify anything, including nonconsensual sadism—because in the new order of things, "abuse can be hidden or left uninterrogated as someone’s private ‘kink.’"

Assuming the book’s accounts are representative—and there is no reason to think otherwise—today’s mating scene makes Hugh Hefner & Co. look vanilla.

"We’re Liberated, and We’re Miserable," as the title of one chapter summarizes. Author Emba also transgresses by suggesting that right and wrong might apply even in the time of Tinder; in the words of another chapter title, "Some Desires are Worse than Others."

Not surprisingly, the message has received pushback in the New York Times, and elsewhere, for menacing the holy bovine of "sex positivity"—as if "sex positivity" amounts to anything more than putting up with your guy watching porn and trying gross things out on you while you pretend not to care.

I urge readers to peruse the rest of Eberstadt's column at the link.

Our culture is saturated in pornography and pornography is corrosive to romance. It heightens male expectations while simultaneously cheapening women. Toward the end of her column Eberstadt writes:

Once, the price of living with men included doing their dishes and raising their children. As part of that deal, what might be called "spouses with benefits" became a thing.

Many thereby managed to ease into death and old age together, surrounded by loving faces. Today, by contrast, with sex "always on the table," as the author observes, the joys of motherhood and fatherhood and lifelong companionship have become luxury goods that few young adults seem to know how to buy; amazingly, in this book that is all about sex, hardly anyone mentions marriage or children.

Outside certain vibrant religious subcultures, mass confusion reigns, and stone-cold abuse becomes rationalized as mere collateral damage. As the author puts it, paraphrasing the thoughts of the choked interviewee, "it was the bargain one made in order to leap off the dating app carousel into the arms of an otherwise great guy."

Certainly there are still lots of men out there who are not sexual deviants (a word frowned upon by the mavens of today's sexual fashion), but the pornification of our culture has shifted the spectrum of male sexual expectations and desires quite decidedly toward the perverse.

A note to female readers of VP: If your boyfriend is into pornography you can be assured that it will eventually lead your relationship to no place that's good.

Do You Believe in Coincidences?

In what is a remarkable set of coincidences six of Russia's infamous oligarchs have succumbed to what RedState archly refers to as an outbreak of Jeffrey Epstein syndrome.

Since the invasion of Ukraine five oligarch's have committed "suicide" and one committed suicide in January. Several of them are alleged to have killed their wives and children before taking their own lives.

Newsweek's Giulia Carbonaro has the story. I'll just excerpt a few lines about each case from her more detailed account.

Two Russian oligarchs were found dead this week alongside their family in luxurious homes in Russia and Spain, with the two cases discovered within 24 hours of each other.

Both deaths are believed by police to be cases of murder-suicide, but the evidence supporting these theories is muddled by the fact that the events happened so close together, with the two oligarchs the last of several who have been found to have died by suicide since the beginning of the year.

Here's a list of all the Russian oligarch who have been found dead in mysterious circumstance since January.

Sergey Protosenya

The body of Sergey Protosenya, former top manager of Russia's energy giant Novatek, was found together with those of his wife and daughter on Tuesday in a rented villa in Spain, where the family was reportedly on holiday for Easter.

The 55-year-old millionaire was found hanged in the garden of the villa in Lloret de Mar by Catalonian police, Spanish media reported, while his wife and daughter were found in their beds with stab wounds in their bodies.

Vladislav Avaev

Just a day before the body of Protosenya was found in Spain, on April 18, former vice-president of Gazprombank Vladislav Avaev was found dead in his multi-million apartment on Universitetsky Prospekt in Moscow, together with his wife and daughter.

The apartment was locked from the inside and a pistol was found in Avaev's hands, leading investigators to explore the theory that Avaev shot his wife and his 13-year-old daughter before killing himself.

Vasily Melnikov

According to police investigations mentioned by Kommersant, Melnikov—who reportedly worked for the medical firm MedStom—was found dead in March in the apartment together with his wife Galina and two sons. They had all died from stab wounds and the knives used for the murders were found at the crime scene.

Kommersant reported that investigators concluded that Melnikov killed his 41-year-old wife and 10-year-old and 4-year-old children before killing himself, but neighbors and relatives struggle to believe this theory. According to the Ukrainian media outlet Glavred, Melnikov's company was suffering huge losses because of Western sanctions.

Mikhail Watford

Ukrainian-born Russian tycoon Mikhail Watford was found dead in his home in Surrey in the U.K. on February 28th.

Watford—who had changed his name from the original Tolstosheya—was ... found hanged in the garage of his home by a gardener, according to The Daily Mail.

Alexander Tyulyakov

On February 25, Gazprom's Deputy General Director of the Unified Settlement Center (UCC) for Corporate Security, Alexander Tyulyakov, was found dead in a cottage near St. Petersburg, as reported by the Russian newspaper Gazeta.

Tyulyakov's body was reportedly found hanged in the apartment's garage. Police found a note next to his body that led investigators to believe the oligarch had died by suicide. Leonid Shulman

The first death linked to Russian energy giant Gazprom dates back to before the Russian invasion of Ukraine had even started, in January.

At that time, 60-year-old Gazprom's top manager Leonid Shulman was found dead in the bathroom of a cottage in the Leningrad region, next to a note that led police to believe he died by suicide, according to Gazeta and Russian media group RBC.

It's possible, of course, that all these men, overcome with despair, killed themselves and, in several cases, their wives and children, within a couple months of each other. Perhaps suicide in Russia is contagious. Then again, given Mr. Putin's brutal history with domestic critics, perhaps there are other explanations for this sudden rash of deaths.

Deterring Nuclear War

Robert C. O’Brien is a former national security advisor (2019-2021) and current CEO of American Global Strategies, LLC. He had a column in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) this week in which he outlined a strategy for avoiding nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine.

He wrote:

If Ukrainian forces push Russia out of the Donbas and even Crimea, there would be no way for Mr. Putin to hide Russia’s humiliating loss from its people. If such an outcome became likely, would he use one of his thousands of “tactical” or “battlefield” nuclear devices to take out Kharkiv, Odessa or even Kyiv in an attempt to save face and end the war on terms he dictates?

This possibility is surely on the minds of President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his staff.

The time is now to deter Russia from “escalating to de-escalate.” The U.S. must unambiguously communicate to Moscow what lies ahead if it goes down this terrible path.

Mr. Putin and his supporters need to understand that if he detonates a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the U.S. response will be swift and significant—far exceeding the limited export sanctions under consideration around the world in response to Russian atrocities in Bucha.

O’Brien does not suggest that, in the event of a nuclear strike against Ukraine, we, or NATO, retaliate against Russia with nuclear weapons of our own, but the U.S. should be prepared to take other serious actions quickly. He goes on to list several options:

• Clear the Russian navy’s two remaining Slava-class cruisers, their escort ships and submarines from the Mediterranean. This could be accomplished by a diplomatic démarche followed by more-forceful action if necessary to enforce compliance.
• Eliminate Russian air and military assets in Syria and Libya on the same basis. The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have the ability to do so fully within hours if Russia refuses to withdraw its forces to its homeland.
• Entirely dismantle all pipelines used to transport Russian oil and gas to the West, quashing even the hope of future sales to Europe. Military assets could assist civilian engineering companies to accomplish this task with dispatch.
• Advise all non-Western nations, including China, that purchasing Russian oil would result in massive punitive tariffs by the U.S., Japan and the European Union that would effectively decouple their economies from the industrial world.
• End Russian dreams of earning hard currency by servicing Iran’s nuclear industry. The idea that the West would stand by while Iran develops its own tactical nuclear capacity should be dismissed. The U.S., Israel and their Arab allies would be positioned to give the ayatollahs a short window to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear program under an intrusive inspection regime.
  
  If the ayatollahs decline, as they likely would, the key elements of Iran’s nuclear program could be dismantled by the full air power of the regional alliance arrayed against them.

Mr. O'Brien notes that these are only some of the steps that could be taken if Mr. Putin employs nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but that the urgent priority is to communicate them to the Kremlin now.

To not dissuade Putin from the use of tactical nuclear weapons now is to risk an escalation that could ultimately involve the entire world in nuclear war:

The same strong and well-messaged deterrence that kept the free world safe from nuclear attack during the long years of the Cold War must be restored to avert a nuclear tragedy in Ukraine. If it isn’t, the risk of Russian miscalculation will rise—as will the even greater risk of nuclear escalation beyond Ukraine.

Of course, if either of the first two steps were employed, then we'd certainly be at war with Russia and it would certainly involve nuclear weapons.

Better to let Putin know that that's where his first use of nukes in Ukraine would take us than to let him think that he could get away with using them.

Richard Taylor's Argument from Intentionality

Philosopher Ed Feser summarizes an interesting argument for the intelligent design of the human brain that was originally proposed by the late philosopher Richard Taylor in his classic work Metaphysics (1963). Feser writes:

Taylor begins by asking us to ... suppose you are traveling by train through the UK and, peering out the window, you see an arrangement of stones in a pattern that looks like this: THE BRITISH RAILWAYS WELCOMES YOU TO WALES. You would naturally assume that the stones had been deliberately arranged that way by someone, in order to convey the message that you are entering Wales.

Now, it is possible in theory that the stones got into that arrangement in a very different way, through the operation of impersonal and purposeless natural causes. Perhaps, over the course of centuries, the stones gradually tumbled down a nearby hill, and each one stopped in a way that generated just that pattern.

This is, of course, extremely improbable, but that is irrelevant to Taylor’s point and he allows for the sake of argument that it could happen.

Taylor’s point is rather this. Even if you could reasonably entertain the latter possibility, what you could not reasonably do is both accept it as the correct explanation of the arrangement of stones and at the same time continue to regard that arrangement as conveying the message that you are entering Wales.

The arrangement could intelligibly be conveying that message only if there is some intelligence behind its origin, which brought it about for the purpose of conveying the message. If, instead, the arrangement came about through unintelligent and purposeless causes, then it cannot intelligibly be said to convey that message, because it could not in that case intelligibly be conveying any message at all.

Random, mindless processes do not and cannot convey a message, of course, so if one believes the stones mindlessly fell into the pattern Taylor describes then one cannot believe that they convey a message. Feser continues:

I hasten to emphasize again that Taylor’s point has nothing whatsoever to do with probabilities, and in particular nothing to do with how likely or unlikely it is for arrangements of the kind in question to form via natural processes. He allows, for the purposes of the argument, that that could happen.

His point is rather that, no matter how complex and orderly are the arrangements of physical components that might be generated by purely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, they could never by themselves generate something with intentional or semantic content. (This way of putting things is mine rather than Taylor’s.)

This is not a point about probabilities, but rather a conceptual and metaphysical truth. [Stones have no] inherent connection with any semantic content we might decide to convey through them. The content they might have must derive from a mind which uses them for the purpose of conveying such content.

Delete such a mind from an explanation of the arrangements of stones..., and you delete the semantic content along with it.

The stones by themselves have no meaning apart from a mind that arranged them in the pattern they're in. If no mind was involved, if the pattern arose through natural, physical processes like wind and erosion, the pattern would have no meaning at all.

It would not be about anything, and you would have no reason to trust its accuracy or truth. But what does this have to do with the Intelligent Design of our brains? Feser goes on:

Taylor then asks us to consider our perceptual and cognitive faculties. These, too, we take to have intentional or semantic content. We have visual experiences such as the perception that there is a cat on the mat, auditory experiences such as the perception that someone has just rung the doorbell, and so on. We have the thought that there will be rain tomorrow, the thought that two and two make four, and so on.

We take it that a visual experience like the one in question is not merely the presentation to the mind of an array of colors and shapes, and that the auditory experience in question is not merely a sequence of sounds, but that the experiences convey the messages that the cat is on the mat and that someone is at the door.

Of course, we might be misperceiving things, but that is not to the point. The point is that the experiences do convey those messages, whether or not the messages are accurate. Similarly, we take it that when we “see” or “hear” a sentence like “There will be rain tomorrow” as it passes through our imaginations, this is not a mere string of internally apprehended sounds or shapes, but conveys the meaning that there will be rain tomorrow.

Now, Taylor is happy to allow for the sake of argument that, as with the arrangement of stones you see out the train window ... our sensory organs and neural structures may have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, such as evolution by natural selection. He is not interested in challenging the probability of such explanations.

The arrangement of stones you see out the train window ... seem purposeful, but Taylor allows that that may be an illusion. Similarly, he allows that our sense organs could seem to have a purposeful arrangement and yet be purposeless for all that.

His argument has nothing at all to do with how likely or unlikely it is that the appearance of purpose could arise from purposeless impersonal process.

What he is concerned about instead is the case where we suppose our sense organs and neural processes to have genuine purpose, and in particular where we suppose our perceptual experiences and thoughts to have genuine intentional or semantic content. And he wants to make a point that parallels the point he made about the arrangement of stones.

We could take the deliverances of our sense organs and neural states to have genuine intentional or semantic content. Or we could take those organs and states to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes. What we cannot reasonably do is both of these things at once.

In particular, we cannot intelligibly both take these cognitive faculties to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless processes and at the same time regard them as having genuine intentional or semantic content – as conveying any message about cats on mats, the ringing of doorbells, rain tomorrow, or anything else.

Delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of the arrangement of stones, and you delete any semantic content along with them. Similarly, if you delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of our cognitive faculties, then you delete any intentional or semantic content along with them. You can have one or the other account, but not both.

Now, our cognitive faculties do in fact have intentional or semantic content. We really do have perceptual experiences with the content that the cat is on the mat, thoughts with the content that it will rain tomorrow, and so on.

Since this is intelligible only on the supposition that our cognitive faculties originated via some mind and its purposes, there must be some intelligent being that brought us about with the aim of having our cognitive faculties convey to us information about the world around us.

Feser goes on to consider several objections to Taylor's argument and shows that they all fail.

To summarize: Either our cognitive faculties were designed by a mind or they arose purely naturalistically through some mindless evolutionary process. If they arose through a mindless process then, like the rocks on the hillside, they can have no meaning, there's no message to be gleaned, and we'd have no reason to trust them or any of the ideas they produce.

If we think, on the other hand, that our cognitive faculties are generally reliable and that the ideas they produce do have meaning (intentionality) then we have to conclude that they're not the product of mindless forces but are instead the product of an intentional agent who designed them for the purpose of discerning meaning in the world.

Naturalism fails to give a plausible account for how our minds can reliably detect meaning, whether it's in our sensory observations (I see a tree in the yard, I hear a sweet melody, I smell a familiar scent) or in abstract ideas like my idea of free will or moral goodness).

If our cognitive faculties arose as a merely natural coincidence, then like the stones coincidentally rolling into the pattern, we have no reason to place any confidence in the ideas they produce, including, ironically enough, the very idea that they're the result of purely mindless processes.

Orthodox Phony

One of the biggest boosters of Russia's murderous invasion of Ukraine is Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. It's unfathomable how someone who calls himself a Christian can support the barbarity of Vladimir Putin's attempt to destroy Ukraine and slaughter its people, but Kirill has a history of supporting Russian military adventures:

In October 2015, Russia’s newly launched military intervention in defense of embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received a clerical blessing. Patriarch Kirill, the powerful leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, declared the operation “a responsible decision to use military forces to protect the Syrian people from the woes brought on by the tyranny of terrorists.”

....Seven years later, Kirill and his loyal clergy now deliver sermons about their country’s role in another righteous, holy battle. It doesn’t matter that many Ukrainians weathering the brunt of the Russian war machine are Kirill’s co-congregants — there are some 12,000 parishes in Ukraine subject to the church in Moscow.

As Russia embarks on a new large-scale offensive in the east of the country, Kirill has articulated little concern about the millions of Ukrainian lives hanging in the balance.

Instead, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has sounded the same sort of ominous and profoundly ideological rhetoric as Putin. He cast the fight as a religious and national drama, an existential battle of good and evil, a clash between Russo-Slavic tradition, values and unity and the corrupting foreign influences festering at Russia’s border.

"We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” the patriarch said in a sermon on March 6.

Kirill went on, claiming God was on Russia’s side ....

Hundreds of Orthodox priests in Ukraine and elsewhere, though, are less impressed. More than 320 of his fellow clerics signed a letter last week accusing Kirill of “heresy” for his warmongering and demanding he be brought before an ecclesiastical tribunal to be deposed.

“Kirill committed moral crimes by blessing the war against Ukraine and fully supporting the aggressive actions of Russian troops on the Ukrainian territory,” they wrote. “It is impossible for us to remain in any form of canonical submission to the Patriarch of Moscow." (The political tensions between Russia and Ukraine had already led to a split within the latter’s Orthodox community, with some congregations no longer associating themselves with the Moscow patriarchate.)

And counterparts elsewhere have made Kirill aware of their disquiet, too. In a video call last month with Kirill, Pope Francis warned against the use of the Christian cross to justify an invasion and war — Kirill recently presented an icon to a Russian commander in charge of a number of divisions fighting in Ukraine.

“Once upon a time there was also talk in our churches of holy war or just war,” the pope is reported to have told Kirill last month. “Today we cannot speak like this.”

To the extent he is a Christian at all, Kirill is a very unChrist-like Christian. Not only is he supporting Putin's war crimes in Ukraine, he's also a former KGB agent:

Forbes reported on February 20, 2009 that, "Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization.

Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies."

Further reporting from March 7, 2022 from The Guardian's Emma Graham-Harrison interviewed local Ukrainians for their opinions about Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The response was mostly a pessimistic view of Kirill and his motives towards Ukraine based on his past as a KGB agent:

Like many Ukrainians who no longer trust the Russian-linked churches in their country, Yuir is particularly wary of the Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, who according to material from Soviet archives was a government agent before the fall of the USSR. "Kirill is a KGB guy, and he supports all aggression against Ukraine," he said, but asked not to give his last name, worried like many in the town about community tensions about the church. "He’s a bastard, not a religious leader.

Moreover, he appears to be one of those super wealthy oligarchs who've profited handsomely from their support of the Putin regime. His net worth in 2006 was $4 billion. It was also revealed in 2020 that an investigation had unearthed several millions of dollars in real estate belonging to Patriarch Kirill.

In other words, like so many medieval popes, the Patriarch is a fraud, and many of his colleagues in the Russian Orthodox Church know it.

The Lengths to Which People Go

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

More on NDEs

One of the more fascinating developments in neuroscience and philosophy of mind over the last decade or so is the increasing credibility researchers are imputing to what they call Near Death Experiences (NDEs).

What makes these experiences so fascinating is the credence they give to the belief that human beings are more than just their physical, material body and that there's something else about us, something which is conscious and can have subjective experience, that survives the death of the body.

One explanation of these events, which are sometimes experienced after clinical death, is that they're really just hallucinations, but a recent study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences discounts this possibility.

The article is not free, but according to a summary at a site called Brain Tomorrow the main finding is that these events don’t have much in common with the experiences someone has if they’re hallucinating or using a psychedelic drug.

The study found that people who recount an NDE typically report the occurrence of five different events:

• A separation from their body with a heightened, vast sense of consciousness and recognition that they’re dying
• They “travel” to a different location
• A meaningful and purposeful review of their life, involving a critical analysis of all their past actions — basically, their life flashes before their eyes
• Going to a place that feels like “home”
• Returning back to life

Hallucinatory phenomena aren't so consistent over diverse individuals nor do they usually trigger a positive and long-term psychological transformation in the person, but hallucinations do.

One aspect of the study that might bear on whether these experiences are truly out-of-body or whether they're explicable in terms of a still functioning but flat-lined brain is that, according to one of the researchers, “...brain cells do not become irreversibly damaged within minutes of oxygen deprivation when the heart stops. Instead, they ‘die’ over hours of time.”

In any case, as NDEs become more widely studied and as medical technology allows the resuscitation of more people whose bodies die, it will be interesting to see whether the evidence continues to lead away from a materialist explanation of the human person or whether it will lend increasing support to the view that we have a mind or soul and that our existence continues beyond our physical death.

For more on this topic see here.

An Awkward Relationship with Truth

President Trump had a reputation for saying things that simply failed to correspond to reality, and many people thought President Biden would bring to the White House a welcome change in this regard.

Boy, were they mistaken. In the prevarication sweepstakes it's hard to say which of the two men is the frontrunner, but given that we're only sixteen months into the Biden tenure, it seems safe to say that by the time he's done in office, old Joe will be the undisputed GOAT among presidential taradiddlers.

Jim Geraghty documents some of Mr. Biden's more egregious affronts against the truth:

By the time Omicron arrived and as runaway inflation had become the most pressing problem facing the country, Americans had heard a lot of assurances from President Biden that the problems on Americans’ minds weren’t as bad as they looked, or would be short lived, or that he and his team had everything under control.

• “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”
• “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist. That’s totally different.”
• “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.”
• “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”

It wasn’t just that Biden’ pledges and promises were contradicted by subsequent events; it’s that the contradiction came quickly, indisputably, vividly, and memorably. It is as if the weatherman assured you that it wouldn’t rain, and then you survived a hurricane.

Under Biden, long-simmering problems like the border, or crime, suddenly take a turn for the much worse, while the seemingly oblivious president tells his favorite not-quite-true story of riding a million miles on Amtrak for the 30th time.

In the past year, Biden has claimed he used to drive a tractor-trailer; that he was arrested during the civil-rights movement; that “for four years, I was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania” (he never taught a class and was paid nearly $1 million to be a guest lecturer); that, “during the Six-Day War,” former Israeli prime minster Golda Meir wanted him to be her “liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez”; and that he nearly hit a home run in the congressional softball game (he grounded out and struck out).

Is Biden senile? The problem in attempting to answer this question is that it’s hard to separate a near-octogenarian’s failing memory with Biden’s long history of exaggerations, half-truths, and lies.

As David Harsanyi tracked, in previous years Biden claimed to have been shot at, participated in sit-ins, represented the Black Panthers in court, and attended law school on a full academic scholarship, and he also claimed that everyone on Capitol Hill calls him “Middle Class Joe” as a derisive nickname — claims that either have no corroborating evidence or have been proven false.

Geraghty links to all of this in his column so you should go there if you want to follow up on some of his claims.

Whether senility is the appropriate diagnosis or not, Mr. Biden is clearly confused, which is quite alarming given that he's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world. After a recent speech, for example, he appears to attempt to shake hands with someone who's not there:

The suspicion is growing that someone else, or perhaps several others, are making decisions for him and that he's just a figurehead. Geraghty hints at this when he notes that:

On any given day, Biden can say something that his staff later emphatically insists is not his administration’s policy or position.

Just recently we have been informed that Biden’s shouting “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” does not mean that the Biden administration believes Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power, and that Biden’s repeated declaration that Putin is committing genocide does not mean that the Biden administration is accusing Vladimir Putin of committing genocide.

We are stuck with a president who does not speak on behalf of his own administration.

Little wonder that his approval ratings are about as dismal as these things can possibly be.

John Updike's Meditation on the Resurrection

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes to all my readers for a very meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

An Allegory for Good Friday

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on Golgotha.

It might be good today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and who those people on the train were and are.

The Easter Miracle

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable.

It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist.

The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well?

If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead.

After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 5

In the final episode of Secrets in the Cell Biochemist Michael Behe sums up the evidence and concludes that the best explanation for the design in nature is not that it was the product of random accidents but that it's the product of intentional engineering.

An article at Evolution News explains how we detect intentional design or agency. The writer, philosopher Stephen Meyer states that:

.... rational agents often detect the prior activity of other designing minds by the character of the effects they leave behind.

Archaeologists assume that rational agents produced the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Insurance fraud investigators detect certain “cheating patterns” that suggest intentional manipulation of circumstances rather than a natural disaster. Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those carrying encoded messages, the latter indicating an intelligent source.

Recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference.

More importantly,...rational agents recognize or detect the effects of other rational agents and distinguish them from the effects of natural causes....systems or sequences with the joint properties of “high complexity” (or small probability) and “specification” invariably result from intelligent causes, not from chance or physical-chemical laws.

....complex sequences exhibit an irregular and improbable arrangement that defies expression by a simple rule or algorithm, whereas specification involves a match or correspondence between a physical system or sequence and an independently recognizable pattern or set of functional requirements.

By way of illustration, consider the following three sets of symbols:

• “nehya53nslbyw1`jejns7eopslanm46/J”
• “TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN”
• “ABABABABABABABABABABAB”

The first two sequences are complex because both defy reduction to a simple rule. Each represents a highly irregular, aperiodic, improbable sequence. The third sequence is not complex, but is instead highly ordered and repetitive. Of the two complex sequences, only the second, however, exemplifies a set of independent functional requirements — i.e., it is specified.

It's this "specified complexity" that's the indicator of an intelligence behind the sequence or message. It's an indicator of intentional design, and specified complexity is exactly what we find in the DNA code and the amino acid sequence in proteins.

In fact, the first cell must have been full of specified complexity, i.e. information, and it's getting more difficult with every new scientific discovery to think that nature, in producing the first living cell, accomplished the equivalent of a tornado in a junyard leaving in its wake a fully assembled, fully functional 747 jet airplane.

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 4

In the latest episode of Secrets of the Cell, biochemist Michael Behe points out a fact about evolution that may surprise many viewers. We've been taught for the last hundred years or so that evolution is a process that creates more complex organisms from less complex ancestral forms.

The mechanism for this is genetic mutation coupled with natural selection, producing new genes with new functions.

Scientists over the last several decades, however, have made an awkward discovery. Most change that we see in organisms is a result of genes being broken or damaged. In other words, living things devolve rather than evolve. It appears that life devolves from greater complexity to less complexity, but if that's the case how did it come to be that there was greater complexity in the genome at the outset?

Behe leaves this question unanswered, and, in fact, chooses not to raise it, so the viewer will have to answer it for him or herself:

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 3

There's a tiny insect called a leafhopper which has an anatomical structure that's simply amazing. Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe talks about it in episode 3 of Secrets of the Cell.

As we watch this video we might find ourselves asking how something like this could come about through undirected, mindless evolutinary processes. It's a fair question, but not one for which the Darwinian has a good answer.

Watch the video and see what you think:

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 2

In episode 2 of Secrets of the Cell biochemist Michael Behe explains what he means by the term irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is one of the key indicators of the intelligent design of life, and on classical Darwinian terms it's very difficult to explain how it could've ever evolved.

Indeed, the only serious attempt to refute Behe has been to deny that irreducible complexity actually exists in living things, but this hasn't been very persuasive.

The episode is only 5 minutes long and has some beautiful animations:

Michael Behe and the Secrets of the Cell

One of the most well-known figures in the Intelligent Design movement is a Lehigh University biochemist named Michael Behe. Behe is famous for his books Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution and Darwin Devolves, all three of which have contributed powerful critiques of the naturalistic Darwinian orthodoxy that reigns in our universities and popular media.

Intelligent Design is the notion that however life and the universe came to be, they both show exceedingly strong indications that they were designed by an intelligent agent or mind.

His critics have tried with very little, if any, success to undermine his arguments, and, to their chagrin, time and advancing scientific discoveries keep confirming his ideas and those of a growing number of philosophers and scientists who agree with him.

Behe's focus has been on the evidence for intentional design found in the living cell, and he's featured in a series of five short videos on this topic, geared to the layperson, titled Secrets of the Cell.

The videos are very well done, and since I've been so impressed with Behe's work over the years, I thought it might be good to show the series here on Viewpoint.

The introductory episode is below. The others will follow over the next few days:

Alien Hands and Free Will

This will sound very weird, but there's a phenomenon called alien hand syndrome that bears on the question of free will and determinism. Neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains the condition in an article at Mind Matters:

This neurological condition occasionally afflicts patients who have had split-brain surgery or other procedures or injuries that disconnect regions of the brain. They experience involuntary movements of limbs.

Most commonly it is the left arm, which seems to have a mind of its own. The classic example...is a patient who intentionally buttons her shirt with her right hand while her left hand follows, unbuttoning her shirt, which she doesn’t intend!

In other words, the two halves of the brain seem to have conflicting wills which suggests that the will is neither unitary nor free. Here's another example quoted in Egnor's piece:

Another example [is] related to food, where the right hemisphere was not pleased with what the left hemisphere had been cooking and threw a vial of salt on the food, to render it useless. These examples do seem to imply that will and awareness are indeed split, and there is a struggle for power between the two hemispheres, and thus the two sides of the body.

These examples seem, at least at first glance, to support the materialist view that all of our willful decisions are really the product solely of our material brain, but Egnor disagrees:

[A]lien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.

We have, broadly speaking, two kinds of volition. In common with animals, we have appetite. Appetite is volition that arises from material processes in the brain.

Appetite may or may not be entirely conscious, but it entails motor acts and perceptions linked to specifics of the environment—a keyboard, a button, a bowl of food, or a sexually attractive person. We, along with non-human animals, experience powerful appetites arising from brain processes (neurochemicals, action potentials, and the like) all of the time.

In fact, appetite is the only type of volition that non-human animals experience.

But human beings have another kind of volition as well. We have will, which, unlike appetite, does not arise from brain processes. Will follows from intellect, which is the human ability to think abstractly, without linking the thought to particular objects.

I may desire an extra slice of cake (appetite), but I think about how bad that would be for my nutritional health (intellect) and decide, based on my abstract concern for my health, to forgo the cake (will). My will can override my appetites.

Because will follows on intellect, which is an immaterial power of abstract thought, will is free, in the sense that it is not determined by physical processes such as brain chemicals.

Will is, of course, influenced by physical processes. If I’m really hungry and tired, I may decide to have that piece of cake anyway because my appetite has got the better of my compromised intellect. But I still chose to have the cake.

My choice was not determined by chemistry, although it was influenced by chemistry.

Egnor argues that alien hand syndrome is a phenomenon of appetitive volition rather than of the will:

All of the examples of alien hand syndrome involve particular acts—a hand unbuttoning a button or reaching for an object, and the like. This splitting of volition to do particular acts is splitting of the appetite, not splitting of the will.

There are no examples of splitting of the will— no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract intentions.

Now, I don’t mean that we don’t have times of indecision; of course we do. I mean that there are no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract decisions—say, to deliberately will justice and injustice at the same moment or to deliberately do differential calculus and integral calculus (one with the right hand, one with the left) at the same moment.

Will is metaphysically simple, in the sense that it has no parts that can separate completely from one another.

In fact, unity of will is more or less what we take to define an individual person. If there are two distinct wills, there are two distinct people. ‘Splitting of the will’ defies what we know to be true of human beings.

It is the abstract nature of will that distinguishes it from appetite and makes it free and metaphysically simple, incapable of being split. Alien hand syndrome is an example of splitting of appetite, which is a brain function driven wholly by material processes.

Thus, alien hand syndrome is not an exception to free will at all. In fact, a proper understanding of alien hand syndrome helps us understand what free will really is.

The fact that split brains can dictate conflicting unconscious behaviors does not seem to be a compelling argument against the existence of an immaterial will. After all, our brains dictate a lot of unconscious behaviors including heartbeats, digestion, the coordinated movements of a baseball player catching a fly ball, etc. All of these are "appetitive" volitions.

Egnor may well be correct in what he writes on alien hand syndrome, and what he says is important, but the most puzzling question of all is still unanswered and probably unanswerable: What, exactly, is the will?

Is Panpsychism the Solution to the "Hard" Problem?

Materialist scientists and philosophers have long sought to expel mind from science. Science, the argument goes, has no room for immaterial substances like mind that don't arise out of material substance like brains.

The problem these materialists have encountered, though, is that it's devilishly difficult to explain consciousness solely in terms of brain chemistry. The difficulty in explaining how feeling, sensation and meaning can be generated by electro-chemical reactions in a brain is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. Science writer Thomas Lewton explains:

It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter.

The question is, how? And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

How, indeed.

One option is to suggest that some form of consciousness, however fragmentary, is an intrinsic property of matter. At a fundamental level, this micro-consciousness is all that exists.

The idea, known as panpsychism, rips up the physicalist handbook to offer a simple solution to the hard problem of consciousness ... by plugging the gap between our inner experiences and our objective, scientific descriptions of the world.

If everything is to some extent conscious, we no longer have to account for our experience in terms of non-conscious components.

Panpsychism is growing increasingly attractive to philosophers who are mystified by the problem of explaining how matter can generate conscious experience. Few philosophers want to embrace the view called eliminative materialism that holds that consciousness is just an illusion, a view that strikes many as incoherent since even an illusion is hard to explain solely in terms of a material brain.

To the extent that panpsychism catches on it would mark the demise of materialism but not necessarily the demise of naturalism. If mind is a substance possessed by every particle of matter in the universe then consciousness can be explained by assuming that when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, as in a human brain, the quantity of mind it possesses gives rise to consciousness.

Even so, naturalism could still be preserved since the universe might still be a closed system which consists of two fundamental substances, mind and matter, rather than just matter. Thus naturalism could be saved even though materialism could not.

The problem for naturalism, though is this: it's but a short step from positing an all-pervasive mind filling the cosmos to embracing pantheism, and once the door is open to pantheism, naturalism is in trouble.

It'll find itself sliding down a slippery slope to full-blown monotheism.

Russia's Failure

No matter how it ultimately turns out, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been a military disaster for the Russians. They may ultimately prevail by sheer force of numbers and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of armor and planes, but the Ukrainians have humiliated them nonetheless.

Estimates of the cost to Russia of this adventure include, according to NATO sources, as many as 40,000 killed, captured or wounded Russian troops. Other losses as of March 29th are shown on this chart:

Rick Newman at Yahoo News offers some additional insights into Russia's logistical failures:

More stunning than numerical losses may be widespread evidence of incompetence and hollowness. Russian vehicles break down due to dry-rotted tires and poor maintenance. Units have abandoned dozens of multimillion-dollar tanks for lack of gas.

Russia seems to lack modern logistical tools such as cranes, pallets and fork lifts, crucial for moving materiel quickly and safely under stress, including combat. Camouflage efforts are primitive. Russian troops communicate over open radios, susceptible to interception, and loot Ukrainian homes and stores for basics such as food.

One unit of panicked Russian troops appears to have turned on its own leader, running him over with a tank. A top British intelligence official said Russia’s “command and control is in chaos.”

With all the effort Putin ostensibly put into creating a 21st century military why is there so much dysfunction? Newman continues:

Russia has...become a kleptocracy with endemic graft and plodding state agencies that make America’s federal bureaucracy look like a whiz-bang startup. In Ukraine, those shortcomings may have metastasized into disaster.

“Corruption is part of the political and economic system in Russia, and what we are seeing in Ukraine is part of the explanation,” Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, tells Yahoo Finance.

“The problem is there’s no accountability. We assume this continues to be part of the problem in the Russian military.”

Russia’s annual defense budget is around $62 billion—less than one-tenth what the United States spends. Even then, secret bidding for military contracts and an overcomplicated military bureaucracy leave ample room for graft. In a couple of rare admissions, Russian military leaders have estimated that 20% to 40% of Russia’s military budget is stolen.

Former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, said on Twitter on March 6, “the Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus.”

Newman has more at the link, but there are important lessons we ourselves need to draw from this, and one of them is that morality matters. A nation run by dishonest, avaricious people is like an oak tree diseased and rotted at it's core. It may look impressive, but its looks are no measure of its strength.

John Adams famously insisted that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” and his fellow Founding Father James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

The health of a nation is determined by the health of its moral culture. A culture which tolerates corruption among its elected leaders, their families and friends, will, like the dying oak, not fare well under stress.

Thought Control

In a column on his Substack page, Mike Mitchell argues that the current transgender obsession is a vehicle being used by the left to gain social control by controlling how we think. His whole column is worth reading but the crux of his argument draws a parallel with George Orwell's classic novel 1984.

Mitchell writes:

To demand that I refer to someone as a male who is self-evidently female is to demand that I deny my most fundamental capacity of perception and cognition. This is quite literally mind control—and all the more so when the willingness to use “preferred pronouns” is posed as a test of one’s moral character.

[It] brings to mind a passage toward the end of 1984 after Winston has been imprisoned and tortured for thoughtcrime and is trying to re-educate himself:

He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought…

He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered...How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it...Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense.

There's much else in his essay worth taking the time to read, but here's one other important point:

Language is the most basic way of expressing rational thought, and the very nature of language requires that people acknowledge shared, fixed definitions. When I say the word “house” I am not referring to something that has four wheels and a transmission.

And when I, and the entire mass of English-speaking people throughout history, say the word “woman” I am not talking about a human being who was born with male anatomy.

If I can choose my own unique definition of “house” or “woman” then these words are useless as words. I cannot use them to communicate with other people.

In this case I would be isolated to a world that exists only in my own mind, a world where my understanding of reality is purely a projection of my own imagination.

Among those for whom English functions as a common language, the word for this state of mind is “delusional.”

To make another literary reference, we're like the crowd in Hans Christian Anderson's famous tale watching the emperor strut by stark naked. Our senses tell us he wears no clothes, his senses tell him he's wearing no clothes, but all of us are expected to speak and act as if he's wearing the finest robes in the kingdom.

Peer pressure and intimidation produce in us a wish to conform to what we can plainly see is false.

As Mitchell asserts, this is the dictionary definition of "delusional."

Sociological Misperceptions

A recent You Gov survey uncovered some interesting misperceptions that Americans have about their fellow countrymen. It found, for example that we tend to vastly overestimate the actual size of some population groups and vastly underestimate the size of others.

For example, what is the proportion of the population that is gay or lesbian? The survey found that respondents tended to put the number at 30% when, in fact, the actual number is 3%. Respondents also thought that 21% of the population is transgender when the actual number is 0.6%.

It's not just sexual minorities. We also seem to have a distorted picture of the numbers of religious and racial minorities in our country.

• Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%)
• Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%)
• Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%)
• Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%)
• Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%)

Interestingly, a similar pattern exists in estimates of majority groups:

People tend to underestimate rather than overestimate their size relative to their actual share of the adult population. For instance, we find that people underestimate the proportion of American adults who are Christian (estimate: 58%, true: 70%) and the proportion who have at least a high school degree (estimate: 65%, true: 89%).

The most accurate estimates involved groups whose real proportion fell right around 50%, including the percentage of American adults who are married (estimate: 55%, true: 51%) and have at least one child (estimate: 58%, true: 57%).

One question that this raises is why our estimates are so skewed. You Gov offered some possible explanations:

Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media.

Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.

If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to.

Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%.

Personally, I suspect that our entertainment media play an out-sized role in creating these misperceptions. Television commercials and programming, for instance, commonly feature a high percentage of minorities, both racial and sexual, and rarely feature religious individuals or families of any denomination.

That exposure surely must influence Americans' perception of reality, at least among those who imbibe a lot of television programming.

There's much more data from this survey at the link.

What if Putin Actually Knows What he's Doing?

An article at a site called DNYUZ gives us some disturbing food for thought. It asks the question whether despite the appearance of serious blunders and incompetence, Vladimir Putin really in fact knows what he's doing in Ukraine.

Here's the lede:

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.”

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

Yikes! What if..?

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

Well, maybe, but Putin already had control of much of eastern Ukraine and all of Crimea so why bother with Kyiv? Why not save himself a lot of blood and treasure and just begin extracting the minerals and petroleum in the areas he already controls, and if he wants that southern land bridge to Odessa, why squander so many military assets in the north?

The article goes on to speculate that,

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality.

The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below.

Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

But all of this could've been accomplished, couldn't it, without losing 15,000 soldiers. There's no doubt that Putin wants all that the article says he does, but he certainly appears to have wanted a lot more that it looks like he's not going to get. The question now is whether the West will pressure Zelenskyy to grant Putin in a peace deal what he couldn't win on the battlefield.

If that's what happens it would be a disgrace even worse than our ignominious withdrawl from Afghanistan.